Easy like Andy

Life, as they say, is an elaborate metaphor for cricket, and Andrew Strauss has had to struggle at neither. From the idyllic outdoor lifestyle of his early childhood in South Africa, via his exclusive education at Radley College in Oxfordshire, and on through three happy years of student irreverence at Durham University, he has found at every turn that life is there for the living. And from the moment he chose to make cricket the focus of that life, he has been determined to live it to the full.

Since May last year, when he breezed to a century on his Test debut at Lord's, Strauss has scored 1202 runs (at the end of the fourth Test v South Africa) at 60.10, including four further hundreds and a pair of nineties. It is a spree that has contributed massively to England's phenomenal run of nine victories in 11 matches, including eight in a row from the moment he joined the team. At Port Elizabeth in December, he became the first player in history to record centuries on debut against three different countries, and by racing to 1000 Test runs in just 10 matches and 19 innings, he achieved the feat more quickly than any England batsman since the legendary trio of Herbert Sutcliffe (12 innings), Len Hutton (16), and Wally Hammond (18). This is clearly not the handiwork of a gentleman among players Strauss is shaping up as one very serious cricketer indeed.

In fact, in purely statistical terms it is debatable whether any cricketer has ever made a more significant arrival than Strauss. But these are issues that he dispatches with the same insouciance that he displays at the crease. "It really doesn't occur to me," he shrugs. "If I keep producing these scores for another six or seven years then maybe, but it's still too early in my career to tell. The great players can do it consistently in all different countries, on all different wickets. There are still a hell of a lot of questions that remain unanswered."

By his own admission Strauss was late to commit to the professional game. "When I first went up to Durham University, I never felt I'd make a career of it," he confesses. "I was a decent cricketer all through school, but no one had ever said when I was 15 or 16: 'This guy will play for England.' But there were a lot of other guys playing for county second XIs, so I thought I'd give it a go, and it more or less snowballed from there."

So there we have it. There was no compulsion for Strauss, no inner rage to drive him to the heights that he has achieved this year. For him, a career in cricket was nothing more than a lifestyle choice - a take-it-or-leave-it option - and with a less dedicated mindset, that could have amounted to a scandalous waste of talent. What sets Strauss apart, however, is his keen recognition that with privilege comes responsibility. His stunning first year in international cricket bears testament to that, but it was several seasons earlier that he began to lay the groundwork.

With so many spies in different corners of the county circuit, the next big things of English cricket rarely remain secrets for long. But there was nothing remarkable about Strauss's early foray into the professional world. Four counties had already turned him down when he was eventually taken on by Middlesex, and as he put it, those early years "felt more like a summer job while I was at University". One dreadful season in 1997, however, forced him to reappraise his situation.

"I averaged about 13 for the second XI," he explains, "and it made me think: I've got to go one of two ways here. Either I knuckle down, take the game seriously, and try and be professional about all this. Or I just give up cricket altogether." With a degree in economics under his belt, Strauss had a ready alternative lined up as a chartered accountant in the City of London. "But that was only ever a safety net in case the cricket didn't work out. It was never something that I was particularly inspired to do."

So he chose his career path, and diligently settled into a six-year apprenticeship, by the end of which he would be utterly prepared to take the final step up to Test cricket. Mike Gatting, whose retirement in 1998 created an opening for Strauss to make his first-class debut, was just one of many coaches who appreciated a work ethic that belied Strauss's privileged upbringing. "From the beginning, he knew where he wanted to be and was prepared to listen, learn and put in the hard work to get there," Gatting wrote in the Observer. "He took in advice and then adapted it in his own way, using what was relevant and discarding what wasn't."

In 2001, Strauss found himself in the right place at the right time - and not for the last time - when he was included in the first intake of the England cricket board's academy, which set up camp in Australia for three months of the winter. "That came at a very important time of my development," he admits.

"I had just started to score runs reasonably consistently, but I was still looking for that magic formula that would transform me from a county player into an international player. I came out of it realising that there is no magic formula. You just have to work hard, get to know your game, and take responsibility for yourself and your development."

Upon his return to England, Strauss was rewarded for his progress with the Middlesex vice-captaincy, but the season had barely begun when further promotion was thrust upon him. Angus Fraser was lured into retirement by the prospect of a job as cricket correspondent for the Independent, and Strauss took over the main job. "It was tricky to begin with," he admits with typical understatement, "because I hadn't thought much about what particular style I wanted to adopt, but after a month or so I had learned the ropes a bit and it was a job I very much enjoyed." His batting enjoyed the responsibility as well. He passed 1000 runs in each of the next two seasons and was rewarded for his consistency with a place in the one-day squad to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in November 2003.

Though his opportunities were limited to a solitary innings in a heavy defeat at Dambulla, a pair of attractive sixties in the Caribbean the following spring ensured that, come the start of the English season, he was firmly in the selectors' thoughts. But even for a man who makes a point of taking everything in his stride, he could hardly have prepared himself for the seismic gear shift his career was about to encounter. When Michael Vaughan twisted his knee in the nets on the eve of the first Test against New Zealand, Strauss, as a fellow opener, was summoned from outside the squad and prepared to make his debut on his home turf at Lord's.

"I'd figured that if everything went really well, I might get a game before the end of the summer," says Strauss. "But one man's misfortune is another man's fortune, and I was lucky to come in and play on a good pitch at Lord's, which is a place where I feel comfortable." He scored an effortless 112 in the first innings, a performance in which his only shred of nerves appeared, understandably enough, when he was on the brink of his century. And as if that was not enough, he was cruising towards his second hundred of the match when he was run out on 83 by Nasser Hussain.

Hussain went on to seal England's win with a wonderful unbeaten century, but he had seen enough to know that his 96-Test career had run its course. "I don't want to stand in the way of a young guy," said the former captain and abrasive cuss who had bowed to no man in the course of his 15-year career, and yet was now bowing out on the strength of one, albeit remarkable, debut performance. As accolades go, it took some beating.

Strauss insists, however, that he remained unfazed by his achievement, despite the enormity of its aftermath. "I try not to get too overwrought about things. One of the things I found out about cricket, after that terrible season for the seconds, is that you shouldn't get carried away when you're doing well, and likewise, you shouldn't think your world is coming to an end if you're doing badly. Cricket is important and very serious, but if it starts to completely dominate your life, it makes it much harder to go out and perform.

"I try to keep calm in most circumstances, but going into that match I'd felt reasonably confident, purely because I'd scored runs for Middlesex over a fairly long period of time, and I felt that I had a game that worked for me. I didn't know if it would take me to that next level, but at least I felt comfortable with it. It's all very well to look back now and think that everything came easily to me, but at the time it didn't seem like that. It was a big deal to make my Test debut, and there was a lot of agonising about what was going to happen afterwards, but things worked out okay for me and I'm very grateful for that."

Things have carried on working out okay for Strauss ever since. A second century followed when England returned to Lord's for the first Test against West Indies, and in between whiles he made it three in three visits by notching up his first one-day hundred, again against West Indies, in the NatWest Series. For a man who had been brought up in the hothouse environments of Britain's elite education establishments, the opportunity to push his skills to the limit at the highest level was too inviting a prospect to be daunting.

"Test cricket is all about temperament," says Strauss. "You need a technique that will keep out the good balls - that much is crucial. But aside from that, you just have to know your own game and know where you can score runs. The best batsmen in international cricket are all very different technically, but each of them is confident in what they're trying to achieve. That, for me, is the major difference between international and county cricket. It's all about the pressure that is working on your mind. You need to be strong enough to put all the distractions to the back of your mind, and keep focusing on what you do best.

"In Test cricket, it is so much more important that you do well, so once you've got to 30 or 40, you realise you have to go on. For Middlesex, on the other hand, my conversion-rate is not that great. Subconsciously you can get a little bit easy on yourself, especially when you're in a good run of form or have played a lot of games in a row. I've never felt like that in Test cricket, and I'm sure I never will, because it is important and it is something we all dream to do."

With 612 runs in the first four Tests against South Africa, Strauss has taken his game to another level already. At the beginning of the season he was being compared to his former county captain and fellow left-hander Justin Langer, a batsman with a limited but effective repertoire, who has built his entire career around three brilliantly executed strokes. Now, however, on the spongier South African batting tracks, Strauss's full attacking armoury is coming to the fore, including a withering pull shot, and a crashingly emphatic square-cut which no Englishman has bettered since Robin Smith was in his pomp.

Soon the question will not be how long can it last, but how high can he go? On reaching his debut century at Lord's, Strauss had been serenaded with a few bars of "The Blue Danube Waltz" by the cognoscenti in the Mound Stand. There can have been few more appropriate tributes. Strauss, like his composer namesake, has waltzed into the public's imagination in the past eight months. Why struggle when you can glide?